Readers' comments

I read with interest Marc Andreessen’s comments about “a massive brain drain from Boston to [Silicon] Valley, which has all but gutted Boston as a place for high-tech entrepreneurship.” It brought to mind the famous New Yorker magazine cover depicting a Manhattanite’s view of the world: two thirds of the cover was New York City, dense and vibrant; one third was the rest of the world, dreary and lifeless.

To be in the Valley these days is to assume that only you can design breakthrough technology, only you can create meaningful companies, and, alas, only you can come up with such penetrating insights as “software is eating the world.” But while the Valley basks in its reflected glory, the very technology democratization about which Mr. Andreessen speaks is allowing innovation to burst forth in places as diverse as Bangalore, Shanghai, Seattle, Kansas City and, yes, even, as Andreessen might call it, tired, old Boston.

Today, we boast a thriving entrepreneurial culture, with over 400 mobile companies, close to 100 robotics companies, and one of the top digital games clusters in the world. We continue to create important new technologies, from the Android operating system to big data platforms. And our diverse innovation culture – Massachusetts is second to none in health care and biotech and we are at the forefront of new energy technologies – gives us the ability to more organically fuse information technology with other innovations to help solve the world’s health and energy problems.

It’s true as Andreessen says that we export a lot of smart people. But that’s because we produce more than 125,000 college graduates each year, probably about 10 times as many as Silicon Valley. Do some head west? Sure. But a huge percentage stay put. It’s the kind of virtuous knowledge circle the Valley could only dream of creating.

The attitude expressed by Andreessen and now prevalent in the Valley smacks of a certain hubris, not unlike its neighbor to the south, Hollywood, whose inhabitants assume that no one else in the world can make a movie. For years that was true. Now, as Mr. Andreessen would put it, software is gobbling up the entertainment industry. Perhaps in a few years we will all wake up and realize it has ingested Silicon Valley as well.

By the mid 1990s, the internet was already an extremely large thing. There were all sorts of databases, college information, library catalogs, classified ads, newsgroups (blogs); you could check your email, post a free ad, chat with friends, or post a comment on a newsgroup. Yet, all those things were done through arcaic Unix commands, on text-only black screens.

Microsoft had already launched several generations of Windows. Windows 95 had a nice graphic interface, very good multimedia features, and solid internet support. It's just incredible that Microsoft didn't include a decent web browser with Windows 95. All it had was a dumb program that emulated a dumb Unix terminal. So, in order to browse the internet, you had to abandon Windows' nice graphic environment and use a black, text-only screen.

That void was filled by Mosaic and, later, by Netscape. Both were truly revolutionary products: multimedia web browsers that took full advantage of Windows' existing capabilities.

Then, Bill Gates made another gross mistake: attacking Netscape. Let's be clear: Microsoft didn't need to play nasty. Instead, Microsoft could have included internet-browsing capabilities within the Windows Explorer. No need for the much-hyped Internet Explorer; no need for worldwide publicity; no need for that brutal campaign of intimidation against PC manufacturers. But, of course, playing smart was not in Microsoft's genes.

Nescape went down. Marc Andreessen positioned himself well and has managed to made some money.

Microsoft was sued and forced to make major changes in the way they do business. Bill Gates left Microsoft and turned himself into the world's number 1 philantropist.

This is a useless "Puff" piece. Too many facts about Marc are wrong. First off, Marc was taking a job with a company when James Clark found him to offer him to join him in founding Netscape. Without Clark, Marc would most probably not even be an entrepreneur today. To present him as this grand visionary above others is insulting. Yes Marc was lucky AOL bought Netscape before the AOL-Time Warner merger went bust. AOL today is nearly dead. Also, Marc did not fund Facebook anymore than I did if I go buy a bunch of shares on the secondary markets. To attempt to tie Marc to Facebook is misleading to say the least. I'd say Marc is a pretty smart guy but there are tons and tons like him. He's average. His returns to investors will be too. Just watch!

Like any ecosystem, the venture world can benefit from entities that take somewhat different postures from those around them, thus filling out all the available niches. While Andreessen may be somewhat over-hyped, it is nevertheless true that he possesses far more relevant experience and skills than many venture capitalists today, who are too often just MBAs without significant operating experience. In the past, venture guys were in their 40s and 50s and came into venture only after a lot of real-world experience; today they are often those who came up through the ranks and have known nothing else. Andreessen is also astute when he notes that "killing the founder" is very often counter-productive - a lesson the traditional VCs often ignored in their desire to play follow-the-leader and adhere to the mistaken principles of people like Sequoia's notorious Don Valentine. All in all, I'd say Andreessen is a welcome counter-force to the great mass of today's VCs who are largely follow-the-herd types incapable of insightful analysis. If he's both astute and lucky, Andreessen will deserve the kind of accolades given only to those like Vinod Khosla, one of the true VC all-time greats.